Regina is an incredible city to do business in. With a young, well-educated, and fast-growing population, businesses in Saskatchewan’s capital can grow and thrive with the city. Most of Regina’s recent population growth has been spurred by immigration – it’s a diverse, multicultural city.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy in which your online presence is optimized to get your business to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant queries.
We’re going to give you 10 highly-actionable tips, tailor-made for businesses in Regina. These tips will help you attract new customers in Regina and surrounding areas like Pilot Butte.
The tips are divided into five categories:
- Easy Wins
- Keyword Research
- Content is King
- Making Connections
- Technical
Without further ado, let’s get started!
Easy Wins
Easy wins are more or less must-dos if you want your online marketing to succeed. Better yet, these techniques are really easy to implement – they’re things you can do right now, for little to no cost.
Google My Business
Setting up your Google My Business (GMB) is the best way to boost your local SEO – that’s SEO designed to help Reginans and others in nearby towns find your business easily. GMB is kind of like Google’s business directory, so if you want to show up in relevant searches, you need to be listed with GMB.
Here’s a rundown of why GMBs are so useful:
- They allow you to show up in Google’s 3-Pack, a highly visual search result complete with CTAs, pictures of your business, hours of operation, and a whole lot more.
- They can be claimed for free.
- They can be optimized by choosing the appropriate business category, adding professional photos, and responding to reviews as well as questions and answers.
There are other, similar services, like Bing Places – they’re also free to set up, but somewhat less important.
Citation Building
Citation building is a bit trickier than setting up your GMB, but it’s just as essential. Any time your business name, address, and phone number appear on the web, it’s a citation.
We’ve got an incredibly in-depth guide to Canadian citation building that’s perfect for Regina businesses – here’s a brief summary:
- Make sure your business name, address, and phone number are the same across all websites. Check Facebook, Yelp, Google, and other large sites to be sure.
- Information needs to be exactly the same. Using our company as an example, the name should be listed as “First Rank Search Engine Marketing”, not just “First Rank”.
- Check Yellow Pages and make sure your business is properly listed with them – they’re one of the most important aggregators in Canada (yes, the phone book people)
Keyword Research
At the top, we mentioned that SEO is all about “relevant queries”. That’s where keyword research comes in. For local SEO, keyword research has a lot to do with location and industry relevance. Imagine you’re an ice cream shop – a relevant query might be “ice cream in Regina” or “best places for dessert near Harbour Landing”.
How to Conduct Keyword Research
The first step is to brainstorm. What questions do people ask you about your business? What would you like more people to know about your business? What topics are related to your business (for example, desserts and ice cream).
You can also use keyword research tools (both free and paid) to find high ranking keywords to help with your brainstorming. All of this is going to come together when we start talking about content.
Competitor Research
When doing keyword research, you’ll inevitably find sites that are ranking well for those keywords. More often than not, those sites will be owned by your competitors.
You have two options for tackling this. The first (and often the best), is to do what they’re doing – but better. Do they have an article about the 10 best parks near Regina? Make one about 20 parks.
You’ll also want to try to match their content – if how-tos are ranking well for keywords you want to rank for, make a how-to. When videos are ranking well, make a video. You get the idea.
Your other option is to do something completely different from your competitors, but that’s a dicey proposition, and one we’d only recommend if you’re very certain your content will be more relevant and useful for consumers.
Content is King
You’ve probably heard the phrase content is king – it might be more appropriate to say content is the kingdom, and keywords are the directions. Anytime you find a keyword you want to rank for, you’ll need appropriate pieces of content to help you rank for it.
Location, Location
One of the most valuable forms of content you can build are location pages. While Regina isn’t the biggest city on the planet, it’s growing very quickly, and building infrastructure to capitalize on that growth will help you grow with it.
Location pages do just that. Instead of simply targeting Regina, you can target specific neighbourhoods, like Rosemont or Prairie View. This can be particularly useful to attract recent immigrants to your business – they’re less likely to be tapped into local infrastructure, and more likely to make Google searches for what they need.
These pages are basically landing pages for any area in Regina you serve – particularly useful for businesses that make deliveries and do service calls, or who have multiple physical locations. Mention some things about the neighbourhood (like landmarks) on the page to best optimize it.
Blog
Have you ever noticed that most businesses have blogs? They’re not just for show – they’re for SEO.
Basically, you can blog about topics and events relevant to your industry, to Regina, to Saskatchewan at large, and to the keywords you want to target. While blogs can have all kinds of content in them, they should primarily be text-based.
Don’t try to shove keywords into your blog – that’s called stuffing, and it can get you huge penalties with search engines. Instead, write relevant content about the keywords you’re targeting – search engines understand semantics, so they’ll automatically understand what the article is about (to a certain extent).
Making Connections
Now that you’ve created relevant content to tie into the keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to get that content seen.
Build Links
The first step is link building. This is all about finding relevant websites that already rank well, and getting them to link to your content. Again, relevant means local and/or industry-related (preferably both).
You can use tools like Moz’s Authority Checker to find how much authority a website you want links from has – the more authority they have, the better the boost to your SEO once you get a link. Papers like the Leader-Post are more or less the Holy Grail for these kinds of efforts.
Be Active On Social Media
Hopefully you already have a business page on Facebook, Instagram, etc. We almost put this in the “Easy Wins” section, but it’s so easy we assume anyone reading this has already done so.
Now it’s time to get active. Join local groups and groups related to your industry. Heck, create your own groups! Don’t do too much advertising in these groups (mods can get upset), but be active – help out your fellow Reginans, and make yourself known. You can occasionally post helpful content you’ve created – follow the 90/10 rule if you’re not sure how often you should post your own stuff (90% other content, 10% your content).
Technical SEO
These are the things you can do on the back-end of your website to improve SEO. They can be handled by web designers/coding pros if you’re not sure what to do.
Get Up to Speed
Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to ensure your website is fast enough – it’s got to work well on both mobile and PC in order to pass the test. Mobile is more important – it’s more likely to catch newcomers who don’t have a PC/laptop, and much more likely to catch local searches when people are out and about shopping.
Get Rich Results
You’ve probably seen that Google results have become more feature-dense over the years – more visuals, more calls-to-action, and more information. That’s a result of rich results. You can test whether or not you’re eligible for these results (which tend to get more traffic) by using the Rich Results Test.
For more details about Regina search engine optimization, get in touch with our experts.
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